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Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

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Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#201

Post by nihonde »

thkim wrote: post #197
nihonde wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely mischaracterized my statement. Also, you don’t know what a Ponzi scheme is. I said that early adopters take risks that pay off when conservative investors are looking for safe plays. Seriously, shame on you.

i take back what i said. i apologize. i read it not as a general statement but as a defense on bitcoin. taking risk on something that does not have any income potential and passing it off to late joiners is very essence of ponzi scheme.

Fair enough. We’re cool, then!

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#202

Post by imtringued »

solotronics wrote: post #195
thkim wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, it is not how normal markets work. a stock, bond, real estate "generates income". that's why it has value. bitcoin does not.

Amazon stock actually doesn't generate income on purpose for tax reasons. They reinvest almost 100% back into the company and by appreciating the stock price the shareholders and employees get to sell stock and only get hit for capital gains tax. This is almost exactly how Bitcoin works.

>This is almost exactly how Bitcoin works.

The difference is that if amazon is worth let's say 50 billion and they have 10 billion revenue and 9 billion operating costs then not paying out the excess 1 billion as dividends doesn't mean they magically disappear. A 50 billion company with 1 billion in the bank account is in reality a 51 billion company.

When a dividend is paid out the value of the stock is reduced by exactly the amount that is paid out. If the money is used to buy more delivery infrastructure (trucks, buildings) the value of the stock remains the same. From the perspective of a share holder who can sell his shares to someone else nothing has changed. You either have 50€ worth of stock plus 1€ or 51€ worth of stock.

With bitcoin there is no revenue that can be paid out or be invested. If bitcoin goes "bankrupt" what assets can you liquidate to obtain at least a fraction of it's value? How does it work?

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#203

Post by imtringued »

randoramax wrote: post #130
frozenport wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another view is that markets are not about gambling but rather investing? For example, index matched funds grow because the economy of the world, as a whole, is growing.

That is the theory. The practice is that markets crash and people cannot retire anymore. A lot like gambling

Markets can recover. If you invest in stock you have to consider that you may not be able to liquidate it within the next 10 years. What if the markets don't recover? If they don't recover you will have far larger problems than your stock portfolio being in the red. The machines and people don't just disappear unless there is a war.

Even if you fail to do that as long as you have started investing sufficiently early enough - let's say 30 years before retirement (around 35 years old) - you probably have experienced at least one recession and recovery until retirement. If suddenly markets crash during retirement by 50% on an asset that is up by 150% does it matter? You still got away with a profit.

And nobody forces you to liquidate everything at once. So sure if you plan to draw out 4% of your stocks you will have decreased your portfolio by 8% every year.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#204

Post by [deleted] »

PineappleFund wrote: post #167
mikepurvis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While true, as someone with a number of friends just now "getting into" bitcoin, I find the zero sum aspect of it troubling. Assuming a crash/correction is coming, most of the wealth that accrued to the early adopters will be at the expense of these later, less-informed "investors" who bought in thinking it was a no fail quick buck.

Hi, creator of the Pineapple Fund here (pineapplefund.org/verification.txt) I am actually quite sad to see the current state of the cryptocurrency community, and how people in it these days widely misrepresent the risk and intricacies of bitcoin/crypto. When I first got into bitcoin, most people were there because they were fascinated in building a decentralized currency. Profit seeking was always a part, but not the…

[deleted]

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#205

Post by goldbeck »

ravingraven wrote: post #156
paxy wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if a company isn't making a profit. It still has assets - whether physical, intellectual, goodwill, brand, or anything else. If you own stocks in a company you literally own a part of all of these.

That would mean that the value of the stock would be decoupled from financial success of the company, which is clearly not the case. A company with very few assets and record profits every quarter will have an expensive stock price.

One wonders what they're doing with all those profits then. Seems like they would either reinvest in the company (accumulating assets), put it in the bank (fairly literally accumulating assets), or pay it out to shareholders (perhaps the most straightforward way in which stocks are worth money).

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#206

Post by Lunar_Lamp »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #178
ravingraven wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify: Bitcoin is deeply flawed, and I agree with you that Bitcoin is probably worth less than many people speculate it is worth (but not zero). Cryptocurrencies in general have a lot of utility and solve real problems.

And yet they introduce a lot of new problems too - problems that have been solved by traditional currencies a while ago. Problems like exchange security and protection to citizens. If my bank goes bankrupt for whatever reason, the government has an insurance for up to 100K for me. When mtgox went down, everyone lost their money.

I'm not sure I agree here. Those are definitely real issues that you've highlighted, but they're not because of crypto currency.

There's no reason that a crypto-exchange cannot be as secure as a bank (or more), and that governments cannot insure crypto deposits up to some value. Those are purely problems for regulators/governments, which have been relatively slow to adapt legislation.

The problems you highlight are real, and can be good reasons to favour traditional currencies, but they're also easy problems to solve - the thinking has already been done once for traditional currencies and the solutions for crypto are mostly identical.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#207

Post by twayamznacct »

pmorici wrote: post #176
glastra wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin has absolutely no utility as a currency. Look at the current mempool [0] to see why. People then switch to arguing that it's a great store of value. Given its volatility this makes no sense. [0]: https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#24h

Bitcoin Cash fixes that by following the original vision articulated by Satoshi.

Hahaha, you mean the vision where one wealthy elite gets even MORE power than everyone else?

I suppose it could be even worse though, it could be the upcoming UB fork.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#208

Post by kindfellow92 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #121
Frogolocalypse wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's tautological. No it's not. I'm saying you can fix the problem by modifying one constraint. Fix the cost of energy, and you fix your problem with energy wastage. It will make absolutely zero difference to bitcoin what the price of energy is. If energy is more expensive, mining will reduce, and bitcoin difficulty resets to the lower mining hashrate. > Do you also suppose that we should reduce vehicle emissions…

What a cop out. So we have to increase energy prices so a bunch of greedy scammers can waste energy speculating on hot air? Again. Give me a break...

Bitcoin is modern gold. You can travel across borders with literally millions in your pocket without having to trust anyone. If you can’t see the value of that then you are being willfully ignorant.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#209

Post by dahdum »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #180
dahdum wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't sell a ton, but I got a call from my bank about the first deposit from Coinbase. They asked how I came about the funds, where my initial investment came from (employment) and that was it. Though my bank did invest in Coinbase so they are probably pretty ahead of the times.

Isn't that also mandatory for them to ask from the government / IRS point of view?

I'm not really sure, over $10k they are obligated to file suspicious activity reports if warranted, so they might have been doing due diligence.

Re: Pineapple Fund: Donating $86M of Bitcoins to Charity

#210

Post by londons_explore »

jstanley wrote: post #60
londons_explore wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much do you exchange though? There seems to be some kind of hard wall at £100k in the UK, and anything more than that seems to get a personal call from a fraud investigator who demands documents proving what money was moved, where it came from, where it is going to, who it is for, and what was bought or sold with receipts etc. Do 10 payments for £10k each, and you'll usually get the same call. If the word bitcoin…

Do you at least get to withdraw your cash, or do they just steal it?

You usually get to withdraw a reasonable amount of living expenses (for which you need to produce receipts - they let me have £100, which is nowhere near enough to live on). They said after 1 year I could have the rest back. I've got 3 months left to wait...
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